Digging Into the McKinsey Report on AI

McKinsey has a pretty good report out about where machines/AI can replace humans, and where they can’t. I’d encourage all in the talent space to take a look – here’s the link.

What you learn from the report is that AI and other forms of automation aren’t new related to their ability to destroy jobs and cause dramatic restructuring of workforces as we know them. A recent HBR article shows that between 1900 and 1990, the population of farmers in the United States went from 30 million to 3 million all while the country’s population more than tripled. In other words, 97% of the farmers disappeared, 3% of the jobs were kept but changed dramatically, the cause: automation.

Smaller examples – the large-scale deployment of bar-code scanners and associated point-of-sale systems in the United States in the 1980s reduced labor costs per store by an estimated 4.5 percent and the cost of the groceries consumers bought by 1.4 percent. Huh…